A private lunar landing from Japan crashed while trying a touchdown on Friday, the last victim in the commercial career to the moon.
The company based in Tokyo Ispace stated that the mission was a failure several hours after communication was lost with landing. The flight controllers hastened to get contact, but they found themselves with just silence and said they were completing the mission.
Communications ceased less than two minutes before the programmed landing of the spacecraft on the moon with a mini rover. Until then, the descent of the lunar orbit seemed good.
The CEO and founder Takeshi Hakamada apologized to all those who contributed to the mission, the second lunar punch for the ISPACE.
Two years ago, the company’s first launch ended in an accident landing, giving rise to the name of “resilience” for its successor Lander. The resilience carried a rover with a shovel to collect the lunar land, as well as a red house of the Swedish artist toy size to place the placement on the dusty surface of the moon.
The company’s officials said it was too early to know if the same problem condemned both missions.
“This is the second time we couldn’t land. So we really have to take it very seriously,” Hakamada told reporters. He stressed that the company would advance with more lunar missions.
A preliminary analysis indicates that the laser system to measure the altitude did not work as planned, and the landing descended too fast, authorities said. “According to these circumstances, the landing module is currently supposed to probably made a hard landing on the lunar surface,” the company said in a written statement.
For a long time, the province of governments, the Moon became a white of private outfits in 2019, with more failures than victories along the way.
Duning in January from Florida on a long and indirect trip, resilience entered the lunar orbit last month. He shared a Spacex trip with the Firefly Aerospace blue ghost, which reached the moon faster and became the first private entity to terrify there successful there in March.
Another American company, Inminitive Machines, arrived on the moon a few days after Firefly. But the high and thin face planted in a crater near the South Pole of the Moon and was declared dead in a matter of hours.
The resilience was pointing to the top of the moon, a less treacherous place than the gloomy background. The ISPACE team chose a flat area with few rocks in Frigoris mare or sea of cold, a long and narrow region full of craters and old lava flows that extend along the north level of the nearby side.
The plans had requested the 7.5 feet recovery capacity to transmit images in a matter of hours and that the landing module lowered the piggybacking rover on the lunar surface this weekend.
Made of reinforced plastic with carbon fiber with four wheels, the rover built by Europe of Ispace, called Tenacious, wore a high definition camera to explore the area and a shovel to collect a lunar land for NASA.
The rover, which weighed only 11 pounds, would remain near the landing, going in circles at a speed of less than an inch per second. He was able to venture up to two thirds of a landing mile and should be operational during the two -week mission, the period of daylight.
In addition to science and technology experiments, there was an artistic touch.
The Rover held a small Swedish -style red cabin with white moldings and a green door, called the Moon House by Creator Mikael Genberg, for its location on the lunar surface.
Minutes before the landing attempt, Hakamada assured everyone that the ISPACE had learned from his first failed mission. “The engineers did everything they could” to guarantee success this time, he said.
He considered the last shot of Lunar “simply a step” to its largest launch that was launched by 2027 with the participation of NASA.
Ispace, like other companies, has no “infinite funds” and cannot afford repeated failures, said Jeremy Fix, chief engineer of the American subsidiary of ISPACE, at a conference last month.
Although it does not disseminate the cost of the current mission, company officials said it is less than the first to exceed $ 100 million.
Two other US companies aim to land moles by the end of the year: the blue origin of Jeff Bezos and astrobotic technology. Astrobotic’s first lunar terrain lost the moon completely in 2024 and turned back in the earth’s atmosphere.
